NEW YORK CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Twitter owner Elon Musk blasted the United Nations as a perpetrator of disinformation, in response to the international body’s secretary-general calling for “action from everywhere” to curb it.
On February 6, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres delivered remarks on the institution’s “priorities for 2023.” Among them is “respect for diversity and the universality of cultural rights,” which he claimed “become meaningless if one culture or group is elevated over another.”
“Social media platforms use algorithms that amplify toxic ideas and funnel extremist views into the mainstream,” Guterres said. “Advertisers finance this business model. Some platforms tolerate hate speech – the first step towards hate crimes.”
In response, the U.N. will “call for action from everyone with influence on the spread of mis- and disinformation on the internet – Governments, regulators, policymakers, technology companies, the media, civil society” – to “Stop the hate. Set up strong guardrails. Be accountable for language that causes harm.”
As part of these efforts, Guterres mentioned the UN’s Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, which advocates a “coordinated response” to “any kind of communication in speech, writing, or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of” their “religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender, or other identity factor.”
“The UN is more likely to cause, rather than prevent, disinformation,” responded Musk, a free speech advocate and frequent dissenter from conventional wisdom, who purchased Twitter last year to make the platform more open and politically neutral.
The UN is more likely to cause, rather than prevent, disinformation
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2023
Climate experts, for instance, have criticized Guterres and the U.N. for falsely claiming that climate, weather, and water-related disasters increased by 500 percent over the past half-century. The anthropogenic global warming “consensus”—the view that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate—animating the body’s climate activism is based on widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings by their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
Conservatives argue that progressives’ rhetoric on “hate speech” and “misinformation” are pretexts for legally and/or culturally suppressing truthful, non-hateful facts and information with which they disagree.